The Big Love (7 page)

Okay, people: this is what I’m talking about. If you don’t have sex somewhere between the ages of, say, sixteen and twenty-two, it seems to me that you miss out on some very important things. There’s a whole lot of crucial stuff I never learned, like, for example, how you get from a meaningful stare over the tiramisu into bed without completely humiliating yourself. Sometimes I think that there’s a whole world of signs and signals and maybe even secret handshakes that I completely missed out on, and the rest of humanity is busy indicating to one another over water coolers and in supermarket checkout lines whether or not they want to have sex, and if they do, whether they’re in it for just a good time or whether they think it might lead somewhere, and I’m just walking along, completely oblivious.

Henry, fortunately, saved me. He put his beer on the kitchen counter and took my face in his hands and gave me a kiss, quite a kiss if you must know, and then he said, “What do you want me to do?”

“I think you should stay,” I said.

“Good.”

“So.”

“So.”

We moved to the couch. Things progressed. When it became glaringly apparent where this all was headed, I felt something approaching panic. I did the only thing I could think of, which was excuse myself to go to the bathroom.

I shut the door and sat down on the toilet. I’m embarrassed to tell you what I was thinking—Okay, I’ll tell you: “What if I cry afterwards,” is what I was thinking. Then, even more alarming: “What if I cry
during.
”And while I might be accused of overthinking things, crying was a distinct possibility. Not only was I about to have sex with someone I wasn’t in love with, I was about to have sex with someone I wasn’t in love with while I was in love with somebody else. I’d never done anything remotely like that in the past, and for all I knew my central nervous system wouldn’t be able to take it. Fuses would blow. Plus, I’d been doing a lot of crying in that bed in the past seven days, and it was quite conceivable that I’d developed some sort of Pavlovian response to the sheets. Perhaps we should do it on the floor, I thought. Yes, the floor. I felt better for a moment, until I realized that it was entirely possible that Henry was already in the bed—just how adult were we being here?—and if he was, there was no way I could get him out of it and onto the floor without appearing to be completely out of my mind. All of this made me think of the last time I’d had sex on the floor, with Tom, of course, many, many months before this, back in my old apartment. I remembered how I’d opened my eyes midway through and found myself staring at the underside of my kitchen table (yes, this was sex on the floor
in the kitchen
) and I’d noticed that somebody had stuck a wad of green chewing gum under it, and when I realized I was thinking about who put that gum there instead of about what was going on, sexually speaking, I’d gotten incredibly depressed. I told Bonnie about it the next day, and she assured me it was no big deal, that sometimes she found herself mentally packing her kids’ lunch boxes while she was having sex with her husband Larry, which only served to depress me further. Now, of course, sitting in the bathroom all these months later, I realized that the reason Tom and I had been having sex on the kitchen floor in the first place was probably because Tom was trying to gauge the state of passion in our relationship, and I’d been lying there, thinking about gum.
She’s like a drug.

I stood up. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. It seemed clear to me that something was about to change, and I didn’t know if it would be a good thing or a bad thing. I didn’t know anything, really, except that I was going to go out there and have sex with Henry, and while it wasn’t necessarily going to blot Tom from my mental landscape completely, it would probably make him recede a little into the distance, for a while anyway, and that was fine with me.

I opened the door to the bathroom. Henry had indeed made his way into the bedroom, and while he wasn’t physically in the bed, he was close enough to it that the floor wasn’t an option, which turned out to be fine. We kissed awhile, and then we did it, and then Henry fell asleep while I stared at the ceiling moonily for an hour and a half, and then I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back Henry was awake and we did it again, and then I fell asleep too, happy.

(Okay, I
know
you want details. I
know
you want to hear about dimensions of penises and descriptions of orgasms and positions and maneuvers and blowjobs and all that, but here’s the problem: my mother is still alive. And as much as I’d like to tell you all that, if I did, I’d have to kill her. And my poor fathers, both of them, I don’t think they could take it either. I’d have to kill them too. And my Grandma Texas. And any children I ever get around to having, once they learned how to read, I’d be forced to put them out of their misery. Still, I realize you’ve come a long way with me here, and you deserve to know a few things. You deserve to know that Henry turned out to be what is commonly described as Good In Bed. You also deserve to know that I realized for the first time why that particular quality in a man is so prized among women, if you get my drift, and I think you do . . .)

Seven

M
AYBE YOU THINK I JUMPED INTO BED WITH HENRY AWFULLY
fast for a person who was supposed to be in love with somebody else, I don’t know. I mean, I think I jumped into bed with him awfully fast myself, so I can just imagine what you must be thinking. I feel I should point out that the whole thing was completely out of character. It was so far out of character, come to think of it, that it’s entirely possible it circled all the way around back to being in character again. One of the hardest things about having a religious background like mine is that it makes it exceedingly difficult to figure out which parts of you are actually you and which parts aren’t. That’s where my eleven years of thirteen-dollar-an-hour psychotherapy inevitably ran into a brick wall. Whenever I faced a moral dilemma, whichever therapist I happened to be seeing at the time would say, “Trust yourself.” That was the mantra.
Trust
yourself. Trust your
self.
And I’d sit there in one of the clinic’s orange molded-plastic chairs and I’d try to get into it, really I would, but I’d always come back to the fact that the one thing I’d learned in church was that I was not to be trusted.

I don’t like to be in the business of blaming the church for things that have gone wrong in my life. I realize it might seem like I do an awful lot of it for someone who doesn’t like to do it, but my feeling is that the rest of the world is happy bashing evangelical Christians and there is no need for me to pile on. I mean, surely a little low-grade looniness about sex is a small price to pay to go through life with the unshakeable conviction that you’re going to end up in heaven. But the problem with growing up with a highly polarized, dualistic view of the world is that, if you ever decide to go off and do things your own way, all you get left with are the bad parts. The first thing I thought the night of the dinner party was not, as I believe I told you earlier, that the thing with the ring was probably a mistake. That was the second thing I thought. The first thing I thought was,
So this is how God has decided to punish me.
It was as if God had taken time out of his busy schedule of rescuing flood victims from rooftops and healing holes in newborn babies’ hearts and decided to punish me by having Tom go out for the mustard and not come back. And I realize that I sound very matter-of-fact, very literal, about a thing that, if it exists at all, exists as a metaphysical reality, but that’s another thing about evangelicals. We’re very literal. Just try to suggest to an evangelical that sometimes a symbol is just a symbol and you’ll see what I mean.

Gil-the-homosexual was an evangelical Christian when I met him—now that he’s gay, I’m not sure what he is. Gil was so Christian back then that we met in a church basement, tutoring underprivileged children. Our church ran an outreach program in which a bunch of kids from the projects were bused in every Tuesday night for us to influence. We sang Jesus songs at them while they threw things at one another, and then we helped them with their homework. The trick was to get assigned one of the sweet seven-year-olds who you could surprise with gifts like coloring books and sticker packs and pencil sets instead of a belligerent fourteen-year-old who greeted you each week with “Whadja bring me?” Why we all did this week in and week out, I don’t know. The kids, I suppose, wanted the sticker packs. I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted a boyfriend who was a Christian but who wasn’t uptight about it, who was good-looking and intelligent and had an interesting job and a sense of humor, who said “fuck” when the situation warranted it, who had attempted but been unable to finish St. Augustine’s
City of God,
who could argue politics with my mother and talk business with my father, who liked Indian food and had nice friends and knew how to dress and would like someday to live abroad. I took a look around the church basement, and there was Gil.

I just realized that I haven’t told you Gil’s last name, which means I’ve left out a big chunk of the Gil story. Gil’s last name was Chang. Gil Chang was not, however, Asian—which brings me to the part of the Gil story I haven’t gotten around to telling you. Gil had gone to a tiny Baptist college down in Alabama where, among other anachronisms, the students weren’t allowed to kiss each other until they’d gotten engaged. Well, everyone got engaged. Everyone got engaged and then most of them got married and then a full sixty percent of them got divorced within three years of graduation. Anyhow, to hear him tell it, Gil had wanted to kiss a sweet girl in his New Testament class and the next thing you know he was married to her. Her name was Lily Chang, and she was Chinese, and Gil had figured it would be easier for their kids to go through life with an ethnically appropriate last name, so he’d taken Lily’s, which was remarkably progressive of him, when you think about it. Lily turned out to be progressive, too, in her own way; eight months after they got married, she left him for an Argentinean tango instructor. Gil kept the friends and the furniture and the wedding presents and—in a truly bizarre move for which I never did receive a satisfactory explanation—Lily’s last name.

That was one of the things I clung to when faced with evidence of Gil’s latent homosexuality: the fact that he’d been married once already.
Gay men don’t get married,
I’d think, whenever he’d say “righty-tighty, lefty-loosy” while trying to unscrew a lightbulb. Then, about the time that delusion started to wear thin, Gil and I started having sex.
Gay men don’t have sex with
women, I’d think, every time he got up out of bed in the middle of the night to do his dusting. I had somehow gotten the idea that they couldn’t do it, biologically speaking—that the hydraulics just wouldn’t work. And the fact that Gil had been married before did explain a lot about him. That’s why he had the queen-size cherrywood sleigh bed, in fact—Lily’s parents had given it to them as a wedding present. It took up half of his apartment. The other half was filled with silver platters and brass candlesticks and crystal vases, and there were fourteen place settings of china lovingly displayed in a glass hutch in the living room, and matching coasters on every piece of furniture, all of which was polished to a high sheen.

I should have known about Gil, of course. I should have known the way you know about a dented can. But this is the thing: everyone has been warned about dented cans, but surely not every dented can is bad, or they wouldn’t be allowed to sell them, right?
Someone’s
buying those dented cans.
Someone’s
taking them home and opening them up and examining the contents and then making a bet about whether or not the stuff inside is safe to eat. And let me tell you, when you’re twenty-five, and a virgin, and you refuse to date anybody but a Christian—and not just any Christian but a
certain kind
of Christian—your options are all dented cans. When Gil and I finally broke up, I took another look around the church basement, and I had the closest thing I’ve ever had to an actual vision. There sat Brian Berryman. Single. Thirty-two. An attorney. Crown prince of the church basement. So morally upright he didn’t believe in dating; he believed in praying. He’d been praying for a wife since he was sixteen. He’d drawn up a list of all the qualities he wanted her to possess, a list which he was continually revising, and then praying about, and then revising some more, and then informally circulating among the single women at the church. A woman of pure heart, the list would go. A gentle and quiet spirit. A submissive nature.
Is this what you want in a husband?
Iheard a voice saying. Well, not an actual voice, but it was as clear as day. I realized that if I kept searching for husbands in church basements I was going to end up with a seriously dented can. And Gil, for all his faults, had at least relieved me of my virginity, which meant that it was now safe for me to venture out into the world and date normal men who would want to—who would
expect
to—sleep with me.

I ask you, what would you have done if you were me? What would you have done? It’s impossible to convey just what I was up against. Years and years of appalling platitudes that were preached at me as if they were gospel.
No one wants the secondhand garments that have been pawed over on the sale table. No one wants the flower that has been plucked before it has a chance to bloom.
And for a long time this made perfect sense to me. Of course no one would want a pawed-over garment. Of course no one would want a flower that had already been plucked. And then one day it hit me:
but I am not a
flower,
nor am I
clothing. I was not an object. It felt really good to finally see through all of that, and to this day I consider that revelation the beginning of my admittedly somewhat stunted feminist awakening. Tom always said that I was traditional when being traditional suited my purposes and liberated when being liberated did, and while he did not intend this as a compliment, I always took it as one. Still, I’ve often wondered why I’ve never been able to become a full-blown feminist. Sometimes I think it’s because, having left one brand of self-righteous orthodoxy, I haven’t wanted to throw my lot in with another, but it’s entirely possible that I’m just too much of a fucking ninny. Oh well. I am feminist enough to be angry about a few things. I mean, it’s one thing to live in a society that views women as objects, and quite another to go to church as a young girl and have it pounded into your head to look at yourself as one. It made me want to get pawed over just to spite them. So I did, and it was fun, and for a while there I thought I was free of all that. But I wasn’t free of it, not really, not in a way that really counted. Because every time I stopped to think about what happened between Tom and me, a part of me couldn’t help believing that the real problem was simply that Tom had lost interest in the gum he had already chewed. He’d been getting the milk for free, and therefore had not bought the cow, and now he was in the mood for a new cow. What right had I to be surprised? This was, after all, what I’d been warned about my entire life. I’d been told in no uncertain terms just what the fruits of sexual freedom would be—that I’d end up alone and unloved, unmarried and childless, an object of scorn and pity, without even the solace of my faith. And, well, lying in my bed the morning after I’d had sex with Henry, alone (because he’d left), unloved (I think it’s safe to say I felt unloved), I was forced to ask myself—just what part of that wasn’t turning out to be true?